The setting for this ethnography of everyday life is Izluchino, a pseudonymous former Soviet “monotown” in the Kaluga region of Russia. As the “Cast of Characters” that opens the book makes clear, Morris's account stays close to the lives of a relatively small number of research interlocutors, drawing on materials he gathered during stretches of fieldwork from the mid-1990s to 2012 and locating their life trajectories within much larger transformations. The book's three parts build a conceptual approach to everyday life that focuses on habitability—the ongoing quest to craft livable lives amidst the constant change, especially change associated with the “churning” of blue-collar employment and broader economic instability.

Part I, comprised of four chapters, including the Introduction, establishes that the legacy of paternalistic Soviet-era factory enterprises continues to extend considerable influence over Izluchino and its residents. Morris presents his middle-aged interlocutors as engaged in a running set of struggles over the new kinds of capitalist labor discipline and “work on the self” associated with post-Soviet workplace neoliberalism. Their frequent decisions to reject or skirt elements of these new labor regimes mean that many residents cycle through jobs in different factories and seek both income and habitability in the informal, do-it-yourself economy—efforts nicely captured in, for instance, an extended portrait of male sociability while tinkering (and drinking) in car garages. Morris balances these men's stories with an equally strong treatment of women's labor and the recent fate of the Soviet “double burden,” making his study one of the few that places men's and women's post-Soviet labors into sustained relationship with each other. Morris pays particularly close and careful attention to the topics of space and place, from garages to apartments to Izluchino itself.

Parts II and III, comprising two chapters each, step outward in various directions from the middle-aged, gendered, and laboring ethnographic core of Part I. Chapter 5 treats an older generation of Izluchino's residents (born in the 1950s) and their ongoing experience of social traumas, illustrating these traumas in particular detail with one resident's alcohol-tinged remembrances of times and spaces of plenty that he associates with socialism. Chapter 6 turns to labor possibilities in Kaluga's new transnational automobile factories, at once enticing for their higher wages and even less familiar than Izluchino's privatized former Soviet enterprises in their expectations about how that labor must be disciplined. Part III includes, first, extended reflections about the emotional labor of fieldwork in what Morris terms “intimate ethnography,” and, second, summary thoughts on the analytical utility of attending to the everyday as an arena of habitability, of finding one's way to “having enough.”

Many of the topics covered in Morris's ethnography of everyday habitability will be quite familiar to students of the ground-level postsocialist experience since the early 1990s, especially in rural and/or working-class settings: do-it-yourself projects, moonlighting, gendered drinking rituals, the importance of sociability and friendship, contested arenas of personhood, and others. Indeed, one of Izluchino's residents sums up the distance traveled since the 1990s succinctly: “Nothing has changed, yet everything has changed” (59). This paradox, skillfully and vividly captured in the ethnographic portraits of working-class Izluchino, is backed up by Morris's (quite proper) insistence that his interlocutors are not somehow caught in the past of the 1980s or 1990s but, rather, responding creatively to shifting, ongoing challenges in the present. Nevertheless, one wonders whether more analytical weight might have been accorded to the change aspect of the book's overall continuity-and-change portrait. Major Putin-era themes in the social science of Russia—the return of a centralized and bureaucratized state, petro-economics, nationalism—receive only passing mention and seem to have little substantive impact on the flow of life in Izluchino. They appear, rather, as yet more changes of a generic sort, their precise contours less relevant than the bare fact of yet more change, yet more uncertainty, yet more obstacles to habitability. Are the details of these social, economic, and political trends in Russia as peripheral to the ways in which residents of this former monotown experience and navigate everyday life in the 2000s as they appear to be in the text? If so, this is a striking and highly significant research finding that bears more emphasis than it is given.